My latest book,
The Devil Can Ride: The World's Best Motorcycle Writing
, is out and on the shelves this month. The book is a compilation of great motorcycle writing, with pieces from Hunter S. Thompson, Robert Pirsig, Mark Singer, Kevin Cameron, Peter Egan, and Jamie Elvidge.
Check out my
Q&A with The New Yorker magazine about how the book came to be, or a
book review by Larry Edsall.
And, of course, you can buy
The Devil Can Ride: The World's Best Motorcycle Writing
Here's a bit of background about how the book came to be.
I read Runaway Ralph a minimum of 572 times at age eight. While I loved to read and would have consumed books voraciously wherever I grew up, my habits were compounded by the fact that I lived in rural northern Wisconsin three miles outside of a town of 50 people and there wasn’t much else to do, particularly when the thermometer read 60 degrees below zero, the narrow little gravel road to our house was snowed in from here to eternity, and the county plow trucks’ first priority was to open up the roads to the seven bars in the township before the DTs killed their customers.
After a particularly long, cold winter, most of which I spent huddled under a blanket in our living room fixating on motorcycles and mice, my father dragged me away from my books long enough for me to fall desperately in lust. You see, my Dad cut wood to heat our little house, and he needed to get his chain saw sharpened at a shop a few miles from our home. That shop later housed the Three Little Pigs Restaurant and the Swine and Dine Saloon, a tiny bar-restaurant where art-deco wall hangings, slumming south Minneapolis granola sorts, stoned hipsters, and local farmers with manure stains on their cuffed Levi’s intermingled in Leinenkugel-fueled harmony.
That was later, when the outside world started to creep into the North Woods. Before the onslaught of chain restaurants, radio syndication, and cable television, the place was a proper greasy little shop that repaired the locals’ hacked-out small equipment for pennies and sold chain saws, power ice augers, worms, fish hooks, milk, and Indian motorcycles in order to pay their astronomical heating bills.
My first terminal case of showroom lust was caused by one of those Indian motorcycles, a machine built for Indian by Italjet with a chrome tank, motocross bars, and a loop frame. I loved that bike and would sit on it and beg mercilessly for one. My parents were both teachers, and Dad had just enough cash on him to pay the $1.50 to sharpen the saw chain. Plus Dad considered it exorbitant to pay more than 20 bucks for a family meal, a hotel room, or a set of tires. He was not opposed to spending slightly more than that sum on rototillers, purebred beagles, and shotguns, but a new motorcycle was not and never would be part of Dad’s fiscal priorities, means, or intentions.
In the summer of 1977, my entire family packed up into the family’s pickup truck and took the great American summer road trip through the West. After the mandatory stops at Mt. Rushmore, Yellowstone, and the Corn Palace (and never paying more than 20 bucks for a campsite, much less a hotel), we crossed the Great Salt Lake and spent a week with my Mom’s sister’s family in a Sacramento suburb. Tucked away in the back of my uncle’s garage was a Honda CT70. During one of Uncle Jim and my Dad’s beer and B.S. sessions in his backyard, Uncle Jim offered to sell the Honda to Dad for $25. To my great shock, Dad eventually agreed to pay the lavish sum, and the bike and I rode together in the back of our Ford truck all the way to Wisconsin.
On the way home, I added motorcycle magazines to the stacks of science fiction, mystery, and spy novels in my room. Reading-wise, my taste ran toward Heinlein and Ludlum as a teenager, although I read anything I found on the shelves in our house or the local library. I read 1984 several times because my parents had a copy, and I read a host of Reader’s Digest condensed books for the same reason (and came to despise them).
I ground the CT70 into bits riding it in the fields and trails near our house. When the CT70 died, Dad bought me an XL100 in nearly perfect condition. To this day, I consider that act proof of how deeply he cared for his children because I suspect he didn’t quite understand the allure of motorcycles, and I know he didn’t believe spending $400 on one to be a wise use of his limited resources.
The rest of the machines of my youth I bought with my own money, and I worked and rode as much as I could through high school, devoting all of my earnings to motorcycles, movie-and-burger dates, and library fines.
In journalism school at the University of Minnesota, I was introduced to literary journalism (also known as narrative nonfiction) by Professor George Hage, a wonderful man who incessantly railed on me about my grammar and read my work out loud in his class. The writing form appealed to me tremendously, blending my interest in drama with my desire to read extensively on a topic as intriguing to me as intelligent robots, sexually aware aliens, or secret agents with mysterious pasts. As I became a semi-adult (an ongoing process that my wife assures me regularly is far from complete), I was increasingly drawn to nonfiction writers who used the dramatic techniques of fiction writers.
Tom Wolfe, Tracy Kidder, and John McPhee became (and remain) three of my favorite writers. I could read their books in the journalism school library without having to hide them under the covers of Harper’s or the Minnesota Daily, plus the topics these writers covered—astronauts and roadkill-eating naturalists, for example—hit the sweet spot of my literary sophistication.
Shortly after college, I went to work for Motorbooks as an acquisitions editor and became immersed in the world of motorcycle literature. Reading motorcycle magazines became part of my job, and knowing who did what well was a key component to being a good editor. I read and learned and also had the good fortune to work with a few of the better writers in the field.
When I set out to do this book, I wanted to combine some of the great short pieces and book excerpts from mainstream writers who delved into motorcycles with meaningful things written by writers from the motorcycle magazine industry. I also intended to include pieces from interesting motorcyclists who had something to say but weren’t necessarily paid writers.
The writers in this collection all have something to say about the role motorcycles play in personal lives as well as society. Unfortunately, none of them write about sex-absorbed aliens. But I still found material that related to what I know well, which is riding motorcycles and reading dramatic narratives.
If you think I missed some great literature, you are probably correct. I was not able to read everything written on the topic, plus these pieces were selected by a man whose favorite works include a bit about a guy who holds the world record for stuffing weasels down his pants. Hungry ones.
So if you want to suggest some piece of motorcycle writing you believe is worth considering for another collection, email me at lklancher@mac.com. There is certainly room for another book like this at some point down the road, plus I’m always up for an interesting read.
I hope you enjoy the book, and be sure to take your nose out of it once and a while to go down to your local chain saw shop or motorcycle store and fall in lust. Better yet, go riding.
